I’ve gushed about how pretty else Heart.Break() looks before, but what’s going on beneath those PlayStation-era polygons? This new six-minute uncut gameplay trailer might seem like the perfect way to discover what one even does in the game, what our goal is and how we’ll achieve it, but… seemingly nothing major is resolved, nothing visibly changes. Which I suspect is the point. It’s six minutes of moving through a city that’s new to you, trying to learn your way, poking at and interacting with things, and chatting with people who aren’t there just to drive the plot forward.

Oh sure, this new trailer for else Heart.Break() gives a lovely look at the computer-programming, romance-finding adventure-y RPG-ish game from Blueberry Garden creator Erik Svedäng and friends, but the real question is: what’s up with that syntax change? Last time we cooed and ahhed over its PlayStation 1-era look, the name was stylised as else { Heart.break() } and gosh, doesn’t the Internet enjoy scrutinising other people’s code? Are you happy now, backseat programmers?

Well, we were mean about WatchunderscoreDogs, so I guess we should be mean about elseOpenCurlyBracketHeartFullStopbreakOpenParenthesisCloseParenthesisSpaceCloseCurlyBracket too. At least this is a game about programming though, so the silly name is a mite more justified. Or maybe lots of hackers really do use a lot of underscores and we’ve been unfair all this time?

Anyway: we wrote about this back in 2012, but the next game from Erik ‘Blueberry Garden’ Svedäng (with art from sometime collaborator Niklas Akerblad) is currently causing internet-wide cooing thanks to a thoughtful write-up and interview by Leigh over at Gamasutra. Apparently, the game has drifted from its puzzle-based roots during development, and into a new and extremely appealing focus on world-building.Read the rest of this entry »

Erik Svedang’s Blueberry Garden was a delightful, surreal platformer about exploring a world in order to discover how to play the game, so it’s only right his next game would be an even meatier meta-commentary on games: else { Heart.break() } puts you in a world where the game’s code itself can be accessed and altered by the player, prompted on by characters in the game. Blimey!